Apprehensions: On gaining recognition
as middle class in Madurai
Sara Dickey
In this article, I examine everyday ways in which residents of Madurai, Tamil Nadu work to
gain and maintain recognition as middle class. In the intersubjective production of identities,
people define not only what it takes to be a member of a specific local class category, but also what it means to be treated as fully human. I explore the critical importance of visibility
and recognition in daily life, and the modes and meanings of the consumption through which
people strive to achieve them. Focusing on two key consumption practices—presenting
oneself in public according to local standards of ‘decency’ and marking class belonging
through one fetishised consumer good, the cell phone—I consider the relationships among
visual apprehension, counting as a social being and dignity.
Keywords: middle class, consumption, class anxiety, dignity, mobile phones, south India
I
Introduction1
When scholars study the impacts of class, we frequently look at the ‘big’
things: the dramatic, the monumental, the long-term. We examine life
chances, life histories and longitudinal data. The object of our work might
be class movements, famous strikes, changing consumption patterns, the
role of debt in impoverishment, the impact of educational attainment on
occupation or (in my own case) the role of marriage in reproducing class
1
Small portions of this article have appeared in similar form in Dickey (2005, 2012). Here
I elaborate on the topics of visibility and recognisability raised in these earlier publications.
Sara Dickey is at the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Bowdoin College, Brunswick,
USA. Email: [email protected]
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/0069966713482963
218 / SARA DICKEY
(Dickey 2010). Class is indeed played out, experienced and negotiated
in these ways. But class is also lived in and through highly mundane processes. Examining the everyday ways in which class identity is negotiated
and enacted allows us to scrutinise the symbolic meanings that underlie
‘larger’ class systems. More significantly for my interests here, it helps us to comprehend the meaning and experience of class in everyday lives.
In this article, I consider quotidian, often fleeting, interactions with known and unknown others that can be crucial to people’s sense of wellbeing. I focus, in particular, on the drive to be apprehended that shapes
those interactions. In Madurai, a city in the southern state of Tamil Nadu,
people remark frequently on how the display of consumer goods affects the
treatment they receive by others, and how they work to present themselves
in ways that gain approbation from a salient audience. This of course
implies that they too are judging others to identify those whose opinion
matters or is irrelevant (cf. Frøystad 2006). What most people desire is to
be recognised as social beings by those others whom they have already
assigned that status, and to gain the dignity that recognition bestows.
Hugo Gorringe notes cogently that ‘some groups have the capacity to
identify others’ (2006: 238). Such ‘identification by others’, as Richard Jenkins argues, ‘has consequences. It is the capacity to generate those
consequences and make them stick which matters’ (2008: 42–3). In this
intersubjective production of identities, people define not only what it takes to be a member of a specific local class category, but also what it means to be treated as fully human. They thereby define one kind of the ‘social value’ that forms the theme of this issue. In this article, I examine the critical importance
of visibility and recognition in daily life, and the modes and meanings of
the consumption through which people strive to achieve them.
II
Dignity and class
‘Dignity’ in my usage is an acquired or contingent dignity (Meyer 2002:
197; Schaber 2011: 152), not the essential human dignity discussed in
much contemporary human rights literature (see, e.g., Kaufmann et al.
2011; Kretzmer and Klein 2002). It is much more closely related to the
intangible qualities of esteem, and especially regard and recognition,
that have recently been taken up by a small number of economists and
political sociologists (see Brennan and Pettit 2004; Castleman 2011; Offer
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On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 219
2006; Sayer 2005). Feelings of dignity, like the most mundane of social
interactions, however, are rarely foregrounded in class analysis. Yet, as
Gorringe argues, ‘poverty cannot simply be measured in economic terms.
Consideration must be given to the intangible goods of self-esteem, pride
and dignity’ (2010: 62). Dignity is not part of the material sources or even
the symbolic signs of class that are usually examined in class studies; it
is closer to affect. In Madurai, the primary way of articulating this desire
for dignity in everyday discourse has to do with class more than with any
other form of identity.
In the scholarly literature on Tamil Nadu, discussions of dignity appear
primarily in two bodies of work: studies of the Self Respect (Non-­Brahman) Movement, and studies of scheduled castes. The use of the concept in
the Self-­Respect Movement was an egalitarian call for all people to recognise and act on their own dignity (mānam, honour or respect; and
cuya-­mariyātai, self-respect)—akin to the category of essential human
dignity (see, e.g., Price 1996;; Ram 2009: 505–06)—rather than to accept a differential sense of worth based on caste. One of the primary aims of
the movement was to advance a group’s sense of self-worth and social
value—by according self-worth through markers other than those of an
externally imposed hierarchical system—instead of a gambit to find a place in that hierarchical system.
Treatments of dignity closer to my own work are found in historical
and ethnographic studies of rural scheduled castes’ attempts to gain dignity by decreasing stigma and refusing degrading transactions (see, e.g.,
Gorringe 2010; Kapadia 1995; Mines 2005; Mosse 1994). (These caste
groups were not a primary part of the Non-Brahman Movement.) David
Mosse, for example, discusses a range of strategies that involve refusing
or modifying exchanges, duties, demands and transactions in a village
in southern Tamil Nadu (1994). Because many of these duties have been
tied to agricultural seasons, life-cycle events and periodic rituals, the deployment of strategies to circumvent them is more intermittent than the
everyday attempts to be recognised that I discuss in this article.
The struggle for dignity emerges in Madurai residents’ talk about their
interactions with others and in behaviours that aim to elicit regard from
others. Finding a way to count in the social body, and to have that standing reflected back through cordial regard, is a striking issue for people in all class positions. Yet, dignity remains a topic rarely raised in studies of
class, despite its critical impact on behaviour and well-being. One of the
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aims of my work is to demonstrate the importance of attending to such
intangibles if we are to apprehend the quality of everyday life in a class
society. I return to the importance of dignity at the end of this article.
III
Showcasing class anxiety
Questions over whether one will be visible as a social person often create
a degree of anxiety among Madurai residents. Such anxiety manifests
among people of all classes, since virtually everyone possesses a set of
peers and higher-ranked social members for whom cordiality matters, and
also because the processual nature of class means that one’s standing is
never set forever; it must continuously be reproduced. In my experience,
this anxiety is greatest, however, among people in the middle class, who,
consciously locating themselves between a lower and a higher class, feel
themselves to be heavily scrutinised as they perform in the public eye
(see Dickey 2012).
In 1999, as I was beginning to investigate local concepts related to
‘class’ in Madurai, I interviewed my long-time acquaintance Jayanthi,
a retired domestic worker who is a monolingual Tamil speaker, about
class terms and identities. We were discussing which Tamil words were
closest to the American English concept of ‘socioeconomic class’. Jayanthi
eventually settled on takuti, a word that connotes, among other things, the
social level ascribed to a person by others.2 In Madurai, she and many other
residents contended, takuti is determined primarily by money and the goods
that it buys. Showing me how the term can be used, Jayanthi explained that
people who meet her might ask, ‘What takuti are you in?’ Surprised, I asked,
‘Don’t they already know that by looking at you?’ ‘When we are outside’,
she said, ‘we put on a “showcase” exterior. I can look fine, but really I’m suffering, so people who meet me ask what takuti we are in’.
A ‘showcase’ is the glass-fronted display case in the front room of
most middle-­class homes. In it, people show off goods—plastic flowers, ceramic figurines, Barbie dolls, small electronics, folk art—and with them, they make a public claim to economic, cultural and often social capital
(Bourdieu 1986). The showcase is an apt metaphor for the surface, material
performance that is enacted outside the home for a takuti-ascribing public.
2
Other meanings of takuti include qualification (as in educational qualification), level, standing and honour.
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On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 221
As Kathinka Frøystad has argued for the North Indian city of Kanpur,
urbanites who encounter one another in public are ‘heavily dependent on
visual criteria both when making class judgements of others and when
attempting to communicate their own status’ (2006: 179). In my work,
the ‘public’ can include anonymous people in the city, one’s neighbours
and acquaintances and even extended family members—anyone who
evaluates one’s standing and communicates judgement by (not) seeing
and by (not) addressing.
In this article, I consider how consumption is deployed to negotiate
middle-­class recognisability in a social field. Madurai residents who define themselves as middle class state, often in so many words, that social existence depends on critical consumption practices. That is, a person
who does not display key material goods not only is unrecognisable and
invisible but, in crucial ways, does not exist. To be visible, to be seen, to
be known (all condensed in the Tamil verb teri) are to count as a social
being, to be a person of substance—and not just to be accorded inclusion
in the middle class but, in this rendition, to be recognised as human. Here,
a social person is one who is deemed worthy of positive apprehension—of
recognition—by a relevant evaluating public.3 Recognition is a transaction that constitutes social substantiveness.4
Drawing from close to two years of fieldwork carried out between 1999 and 2009 in Madurai (and, more briefly, in Chennai and Coimbatore), I examine how people who wish to be acknowledged as middle class
present themselves, and how anxieties and self-critiques circulate around
these behaviours and exchanges of apprehension. By ‘middle class’ I
mean those residents of Madurai who identify themselves as such.5 This
apparent circularity—that people who already call themselves middle class
3
For other ways of defining the social person or social body in southern India, see Osella and Osella (1996) and Staples (2005).
4
The goal of being recognised is to create belonging in the same ‘society’ vis-à-vis
which the youth described by Constantine Nakassis in this issue position themselves as
exterior. Interestingly, much of the status production in both cases takes place in ‘public’
realms—here, meaning outside the home—though the people I quote are searching for
recognition while youth are avoiding it, and my respondents largely emphasise their
passage through the public realm while young Tamil men congregate in it. Moreover,
class standing is produced by my respondents in both domestic and non-domestic realms,
while youth, by definition, are outside of the domestic. 5
On earlier ‘self-fashioning’ projects of the ‘middle class’ in India, especially in relation
to the use of consumption, see Haynes and McGowan (2010).
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must nonetheless aim to be accorded this status by others whom they see
as middle class—is a reflection of the constant work it takes to be of a certain class, part of the process by which class identities and relations
are constructed. It also underscores the intersubjective and interactive
construction of class identities.
Madurai has a population of about one million, with a primarily mercantile economy based in agricultural products and other local trade. It is
depicted as a socially conservative city, both by its own residents and by
those of Tamil Nadu’s more self-consciously modern cities (generally agreed
to be Chennai and Coimbatore). The conservatism refers primarily to norms
of gender, marriage arrangements and religious and familial duties.
In Madurai, the number of people who identify as middle class has
grown substantially since economic liberalisation. They generally refer
to themselves as ‘middle class’ when speaking English, or in Tamil as
natuttaramānavan.ka or natuttara kutumpam (‘people in the middle’
or ‘middle family’, terms that were rarely used before the 1990s). This
group of people varies widely in occupation, education, assets and other
markers of class status, but most middle-class people feel they are rather
precariously and often anxiously situated between the destitute poor and
the unrestrained rich (see Dickey 2012). They include certain daily wage
earners (such as taxi and autorickshaw drivers), small business owners
and professionals (teachers, health workers, civil servants).6 Although
this wide-ranging group constitutes a larger set of people than those
included in standard scholarly and policy definitions of the middle class (see, e.g., Desai 2007; Deshpande 2003; Fernandes 2006; Lakha 1999;
Sridharan 2004), they are nonetheless a minority of Madurai’s population,
outnumbered by those who have less economic security (in colloquial
Tamil, ēlai makkal or illātavan.ka, ‘poor people’ or ‘those who don’t
have’). Smaller still is the group of people identified as ‘wealthy’ or ‘upper class’ (periyavan.ka, big people;; panakkāran.ka, moneyed people; or
vacatiyānavan.ka, people with resources).
Soon after my early conversation with Jayanthi, I began to explore the
notion of a showcase exterior, asking people why it felt crucial to present
6
Thus, the local Madurai category (or even categories) of the middle class would exclude
the ‘professionals’ who are the target consumers of the luxury housing developments that
Llerena Searle describes in this issue. Searle’s discussion of this carefully circumscribed
category underscores the importance of examining the many Indian ‘middle classes’ within
their local cultural, political and economic contexts.
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On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 223
themselves in particular ways in public. This conscious self-presentation
is one of the tropes used to talk about the everyday experience of class
relations and the construction of a class identity. Another frequent mode
of conversation, which serves sometimes as a critique of oneself and
sometimes as a critique of others, is commentary on the role of specific consumer goods in constructing a social self. Both of these topics are
discussed in this article. Consumption is one process in the constitution
of individuals’ and groups’ identities. As Daniel Miller argues, our use
of material culture helps us to understand ourselves in new ways, just as
our use of those objects (and our incorporation, or ‘sublation’, of them
into our identities) changes our understanding of the objects themselves
(Miller 1987, 2010). These processes will be clear in the accounts below.
I am less concerned, however, about the identity that material culture helps
to produce, than about the deployment of objects in enjoining others to
confirm that identity.
Since my research period covered a decade of changing consumerism, there have predictably been shifts in the material goods utilised in
these modes of self-presentation. More intriguingly, there have also been
striking consistencies. Through these years, the discussions I focus on
here—of self-presentation and of the role of consumer goods in creating a social self—were each dominated by a specific topic: in the first case, the importance of looking ‘decent’ when going outside the home
(a concern primarily of lower-middle-class and poor people, for whom
appearing decent requires disproportionate effort and expense); and in the
second, the signifying value of one fetishised good—cell phones—which
provides a frequent item of conversation among people throughout the
middle class. These foci illustrate two striking features of contemporary
modernity in Madurai, both heightened since liberalisation: (a) control
and discipline of the body; and (b) the role of material goods in defining a person. Of all the forms of cultural capital that are used to claim and
interpret class identities, these two appeared most frequently in the commentaries I heard in the 1999–2009 decade, while they had been absent
from widely condoned practices previously. In both cases, it is not just
the material goods that signify, but also the knowledge of how to deploy
them as markers of status (see Bourdieu 1984).
To introduce the dynamics by which social visibility confirms or denies a person’s status as someone who counts, as well as to anchor the anxieties
and the interactive dynamics of middle-class members and aspirants,
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I begin with brief excerpts from interviews with several people who could
not even hope to be seen as middle class. Their observations illustrate three
key issues: (a) the importance of money/class as a source of respect; (b)
the critical significance of being seen to the marking of a person’s class standing; and (c) the range of others who act as a scrutinising audience
in events of such marking.
The first interview was held in 2004 with Indira, a construction worker (cittāl) I had met as she walked to work down my street, and with her
neighbours Rajkumar and Mallika. Rajkumar and Mallika are Thevars;; I never knew Indira’s caste.7 Rajkumar is a butcher, operating a stall in an outer area market two days a week, and Mallika did agricultural (kūli)
labour before she and Rajkumar married. (She was unemployed at the time, by her husband’s and in-laws’ choice.) Indira is married with one grown
son, and Mallika and Rajkumar have two young sons whom they had not yet been able to send to school for financial reasons. After talking about the long stretches of difficulties in their lives, they turned to the treatment they receive from passersby, customers, neighbours and family.
Indira: Here, it’s all like, well-off people will only talk with us if we
have vacati (resources) too.8 Even when they see us, they look at us
like we are disgusting.
Mallika: They only give us respect if we have money.
7
I include caste identities in this article because they are closely tied to consumption
practices and attitudes, and because caste and class interact in a number of other ways as well.
Caste groups vary in their attitudes toward consumption—such as which kinds of consumer
goods and practices are most valuable and prestigious, and to what extent those goods and
practices should be displayed and enacted in public and at home. Caste also affects the value
that families place on education, and the historical privileges of and discrimination against
particular castes that continue to affect access to education and occupations (Béteille 1991;
Da Costa 2008; Desai and Dubey 2011; Desai and Kulkarni 2008). See Dickey (2012) for
an extended discussion of the intersections of class and caste in Madurai.
The castes of respondents cited in this article are ranked roughly as follows, from ‘lower’
to ‘higher’: Chakkiliyar, Pallar, Nādār, Thevar, Acari, Naidu, Chettiar, Pillai, Brahman. A number of people I quote have different positions in the class hierarchy than they do in
the caste hierarchy.
8
Vacati means both ‘resources’ and ‘convenience’, and is often used to refer to key
consumer goods that distinguish people of different classes. As noted above, one of the terms
.
for relatively wealthy people in Madurai is vacatiyānavanka (people with vacati). For an
incisive discussion of vacati in another Tamil Nadu city, see Tolen (2000).
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On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 225
Rajkumar: Now, it’s only money that’s really important. Before, people put more importance on relationships and behaviour, but now only money
is important. Even the children we bear respect us, even the siblings we
were born with will look at us and visit us, only if we have money.
Indira: Money is the most important thing in Madurai, even more than
jāti (caste).
Rajkumar: If a person is well off, people will look at them respectfully, no matter what their jāti is.9
This discussion highlights the operation of vision in determining respect. In
addition, it centres on the fundamental importance of financial means—and the kinds of cultural capital they generate and that generate them in turn—in
determining social relations even with those to whom one is most closely tied,
a point that recurs frequently in current discourse about social relations.
The importance of being seen and addressed was also highlighted by
Vijayalakshmi, an impoverished thread-factory worker belonging to the
Acari caste. Vijayalakshmi, who in 2004 was 30 years old, is widowed
and lives with her parents, two brothers, one sister and the sister’s husband and six-year-old daughter, all in a rented one-room home. The men
are goldsmiths. Vijayalakshmi’s niece is the first female member of the family to attend school. Vijayalakshmi complained that when she and
her family members go out in messy or torn (‘not-decent’) clothing, rich
people ‘won’t speak with us. They glance right past us and scuttle off
(viruvirunnu pōyituvān.ka). We have nothing, and they have a lot, right?
So they hustle away’.10 Here, ‘rich people’s refusal to see’ is a refusal
9
These assertions about the relative significance of caste and money are important as a form of contemporary discourse, but they cannot necessarily be taken at face value.
10
Even today, the relationship that the poor have with the material culture of consumer
goods can differ from that of wealthier people. A sense of (potential) loss, for example, may
shape the affect and meaning attached to goods that cannot be replaced when they wear
out, or that may have to be pawned or sold to finance bigger needs. Banerjee and Miller (2003: 54–5) describe the sadness that poor women feel when the one decent sari kept in a
trunk for ‘going out’ becomes too worn to be respectable. Skuse, who explores the ‘social
life and death’ of radios in Afghanistan, writes that ‘the meanings and memories invested
by the poor in items of material culture can be perceived as highly fluid, their experience of consumption being as closely associated with feelings of loss and alienation as with the
pantheon of meanings invested through acts of consumption’ (2005: 124). Skuse argues
that such loss and divestment can create a potential ‘realienation of things’ (ibid.).
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226 / SARA DICKEY
to ratify and substantiate them as full social persons. Like Rajkumar, Mallika and Indira, Vijayalakshmi emphasises the near-impossibility
of getting wealthier people to mark her as worthy of respect through
visual accord.
Social exclusion can take place through a number of means. Steffen
Hermann cites spatial segregation, enforced lack of participation and
practices of misrecognition (2011: 134–5). To these we should add the
practice of non recognition. This is the systematic refusal to recognise a
person as who she claims herself to be, or to accord him the identity he
claims for himself. These experiences of denied existence are the stuff
of middle-class fears.
IV
Appearing decent: Passing class thresholds
If self-presentation to the social body is shaped by the desire to gain social
standing, one of the fundamental means of gaining the approving gaze is
looking ‘decent’ to the public eye. In urban Tamil Nadu, decency encompasses neatness, cleanliness and modesty—qualities imbued with moral
value. ‘Decency’ is one of the primary attributes assumed to distinguish
middle-class people from those below them, and thus to mark entry into
the middle class.11 It is the quality that lower-middle-class people most
often invoke when explaining how they try to present themselves to a
watchful public.
In 2004, I was talking with three friends, all in their late 20s or early
30s, about how the everyday world had changed since their childhoods.
Anjali, whom I have known since 1985 when she was seven, and her
husband Sundaram own a small printing and graphics design business; she
is Pillai and he is Thevar. Murugan is a videographer who runs his own
business, and his family is Nādār. Murugan and Anjali met in the mid-­
1990s when they worked in adjoining offices. They are both economically better off than their parents were (Anjali’s father drove a bicycle rickshaw
and Murugan’s father was a car driver), and they achieved solid middleclass standing in their adulthood. Sundaram, whose father was a civil
11
On definitive concerns about cleanliness and order, see also Searle in this issue. For a discussion of similar standards for clothing and self-presentation, see Frøystad
(2006: 166).
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On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 227
servant, is perhaps less economically secure than his father was, but not
drastically so. I asked them what it means to be ‘decent’, a standard that
by 2004 had become widely shared. Because, by then, it had also become
a highly taken-for-granted concept, they found it hard to articulate what
‘decency’ meant. Shifting tactics, I asked them to describe how someone
who is not decent looks.
Murugan: It’s someone whose clothing is dirty, unironed, torn, and
unwashed, and whose hair is unoiled. They have no neatness (nītnas illāma iruppān.ka).
Sara: What do you mean by neatness?
Murugan: Good clothes, new clothes.
Sundaram: If we wear old clothes, we feel really uncomfortable.
Anjali: We feel like we need to wear new clothes. If we’re going out,12
we’ll wear the newest clothing we have.
Sundaram: If I went out to meet you, and didn’t have a nice outfit on, I’d be embarrassed and feel like I should have worn nice clothing.
Trying to get at the behavioural consequences that underscore the importance of looking decent, I asked them, ‘What would happen if you went
out without looking decent?’
Murugan: If you’re standing across the road from us, you’ll think,
‘Poor things, they are suffering’ (pāvam, kastappattirukān.ka), and
we mustn’t have people think that way. They’ll think, ‘Why did these
people come out looking like this?’
Sara: How would you feel?
All three in unison: Ashamed.
Anjali: We don’t want anyone to know we are suffering, so we go out
looking neat.
12
To ‘go out’, a phrase frequently repeated, means going shopping, or going out of the
immediate neighbourhood or going to meet anyone other than one’s closest neighbours,
including the households of family members. It involves passing through and presenting
oneself to the scrutiny of others.
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228 / SARA DICKEY
Sara: If you are suffering, why shouldn’t anyone know?
Murugan: They’ll respect us less. If someone is suffering, no one
respects them. They dismiss them, they think that person is beneath
them (ikalcci neneppān.ka, tālvu neneppān.ka). Their behaviour won’t
be very nice.
Sara: How so?
Anjali: They won’t show much respect.
Murugan: Not from everyone, mostly just from some people—it’s worst
with relatives. Now, in our house, we have a girl who is ready to get
married. (If we aren’t decent) no one would ask for her to marry their
sons. Lots of people are like that.
Here we see that, whereas certain kinds of consumption make a person
‘count’ in society by making that person visible to a spectatorial public
(see also Liechty 2003: 140–45; Srinivas 2002), the reverse situation—to
lack and therefore be unable to deploy certain consumer goods in public—
makes a person simultaneously pitiable and socially invisible. Murugan,
Anjali and Sundaram emphasised the dismissal, lowness and invisibility
that improper or inadequate consumption results in, and the immediate and
long-term consequences of these. In Tamil, pāvam means both a pitiable
person and the act of sinning, both of which are associated with poverty.
(This association underlies Indira’s observation before that any glance
people give her is one of disgust.)
People who are middle class, or who desire to be, often emphasised
their consequent strategies for gaining visibility in public. They noted,
for example, the need to keep at least one set of presentable clothing
aside for shopping, visiting or dealing with officials, because otherwise they will not be ‘seen’ by the people they pass through and approach.
Chellamma, a Chakkiliyar woman in her 20s whose husband is an electrical worker, visited me often in 2004 and 2005 after her third child was
born. I had known Chellamma since her childhood, and her second child
was my son’s age. She said that when she left her home to come visit
me, and any other time she ‘went out’, she would dress herself and her
children in their best clothing, because otherwise ‘people won’t see us’
(avan.kalukku en.kalai teriyātu, which literally translates as ‘we will not
be visible to them’) and ‘they will not treat me with respect’ (mariyātai Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 229
kutukkamāttān.ka).13 Like the others, Chellamma’s aim was to be neat
and clean and presentable, not to be fashionable. In these cases, fashion
is far less critical than decency.
Fundamentally, then, a person has to be decent in order to be recognisable, to be worthy of respectful interaction—in sum, to count in the
public eye. (There are also negatively coded ways of interacting, as these
accounts suggest, but as I discuss below, other evidence reveals that
reciprocal interaction usually indicates that a person merits being seen.)
The structure of this encounter deserves some attention. Those who go
out, wishing to be seen, are already ‘seeing’ others as social beings. In the
process of recognition, there is a reciprocal visual interaction, just as in
darsan. ‘Taking darsan’ is the practice of seeing and being seen by a deity
in Hindu (and sometimes Christian) worship, an ‘exchange of vision’ (Eck
1981: 6) and ‘visual intermingling’ (Pinney 2002: 364). People can also
take darsan of other humans, as they frequently do when viewing political and religious leaders or celebrities, and Madurai residents’ descriptions
of presenting themselves to be ‘seen’ by empowered others resembles
this practice closely. As with worshippers, people who are ‘going out’
in Madurai represent themselves as the initiators of what they hope will
result in a visual transaction. Vision accords recognition when it is an
exchange; it need not be egalitarian, but it must be reciprocated.
V
Displaying cell phones: Substantiating class belonging
While being decent is often understood as the minimum standard for
counting as a social being, it is insufficient for ensuring a solid position in the middle class. Other kinds of consumption, especially fashion-based
consumption (and by this I mean simply keeping up with or ahead of
trends, whether they be of clothing, technologies or rituals), are necessary
13
This is especially interesting in Chellamma’s case (as with Sekaran below), since proper
consumption makes her ‘count’ despite her Chakkiliyar caste (a scheduled, or dalit, caste).
For both Chellamma and Sekaran, in this urban social field (and as Indira and Rajkumar claimed above), class may compensate to some extent for caste standing. Chellamma is
invoking both known and anonymous observers, only some of whom will know her caste,
whereas Sekaran most frequently refers to people in his neighbourhood and his co-workers,
who are certain to know his caste.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
230 / SARA DICKEY
for being counted—or standing out—in smaller reference groups within
the middle class.14 Interestingly, discourses around such practice often
highlight the connection between consumption and existence.15
Of all the wide range of material goods that signify middle-class
standing and its gradations—including clothing, televisions, refrigerators, motorbikes, gold, housing, etc.—the one that has caught the public
imagination and appears most frequently in discussions of consumption
and identity is the cell phone. Cell phones are easily carried (thus of
course ‘mobile’) and displayed on one’s person, and they signify taste
and technological literacy, social networks and relative wealth (and thus
cultural, social and economic capital).
India is reported to have the second highest number of mobile phone
subscriptions in the world,16 and cell phones are now owned widely
across classes. Both cell phones and calling options became relatively
inexpensive in the mid-2000s, resulting in a surge of ownership. The
explosion of cell phone subscribers has meant a sharp rise in ‘teledensity’—the ratio of phone subscribers to population—in India over the
past decade. Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron have charted the growth of telephone ownership and access in India.17 In 1987, they note, India had
three phones for every 1,000 people (including individual landlines and
pay phones). By 1999, there were close to 23 phones per 1,000 people.
In early 2010, the ratio had jumped to 510 to 1,000—a ratio of more
than one telephone for every two people—and, significantly, more than 90 per cent of those phones were then cell phones (Jeffrey and Doron
2011: 399). The most recent data as of this writing show that by late
2012, teledensity was 768 to 1,000, 97 per cent of it cellular. Nationwide,
14
The distinction between being decent and being fashionable is a locally meaningful
if slippery difference—neither necessarily implies the other, but to the extent that both aim
at inclusion within a group and the exclusion of those who do not or cannot comply, both
have to do with meeting or exceeding a threshold.
15
Although the range of goods available for consumption has increased since
liberalisation—and so too the fineness of differences that can be established through consumer goods—ties between consumption and status are certainly not new in South Asia. See, for
example, Banerjee and Miller (2003); Greenough (1995: 221); Haynes et al. (2010); Liechty
(2003: 99); McGowan (2009); Srinivasan (2003); Venkatachalapathy (2006).
16
Mobithinking.com, ‘The insider’s guide to mobile Web marketing in India.’ Available
at http://www.mobithinking.com/guide-mobile-web-India. Accessed on 7 January 2013.
17
They draw from data from the Indian Department of Telecommunications and the
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Also see Jeffrey and Doron (2012: 64, 69). Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 231
there were 904,230,000 mobile phone subscribers and 63 per cent of
these subscribers were in urban areas.18
Cell phones are not only widely owned, they are also finely graded in terms of quality and taste, making them useful for marking and imagining
identities. This remains as true in Madurai today as it was a decade ago.
Such durability is rather remarkable, given the pace at which consumption signifiers change in contemporary India. The cell phone has both a ‘material presence’ (Banks 2001: 81, 86–87) and a communicative function, along with other ‘inherent’ uses such as information storage (Miller
2010: 111–13).19 That material presence includes the location in which the
cell phone is displayed on or near the body, the phone’s appearance, its
features, the data kept in it and the sounds that nearby people hear when
the phone ‘rings’. In their talk about cell phones, Madurai residents tend
to emphasise the phones’ materiality, though their use as communication
devices does play a role in determining who should or should not be allowed to use a cell phone, as I discuss below. Like decent clothing and
grooming practices, cell phones are incorporated into their users’ selves
and both shape and communicate an identity.
Murugan had a cell phone. Anjali and Sundaram did not, at that time.20
When I interviewed them together in 2004, we talked about the increased
availability of consumer goods since liberalisation, which they all viewed
as a positive change. I asked them which goods are most important to
own. Murugan cited his cell phone and his motorbike. Then, glancing at
his friends, he quickly added that while he needs these for his business,
18
TRAI. 2012. ‘Highlights on Telecom Subscription Data as on 31st October 2012’, p. 1. Available at http://trai.gov.in/Content/PressDetails.aspx?PRESS_REL_ID=2010&pg=0. Accessed on 7 January 2013.
19
In other words, cell phones play both ‘instrumental and symbolic roles’ in India
(Donner et al. 2008: 333), as elsewhere. These roles go well beyond those I focus on in
this article. They include, to cite a small sample of possibilities, sending a signal through
‘“missed calls”, taking pictures, checking prices, downloading screen savers, doing pujas’
(Jeffrey and Doron 2011: 398;; see also Doron. 2010. India's Mobile Revolution: A view from Below. Inside Story. Available at http://inside.org.au/india-mobile-revolution, 10 February.
Accessed on 3 May 2010).
20
On the other hand, mobile phones had been important in Anjali and Sundaram’s history.
They were able to keep their developing ‘love relationship’ secret from their families, and
avoid the risk of meeting in person, for a number of years by communicating over their
friends’ mobile phones (Dickey 2010; see Donner et al. 2008 for a discussion of cell phones’
place in maintaining ‘romantic relationships’ in Bangalore, and Doron 2012 for Varanasi).
As of 2009, Sundaram and Anjali both owned cell phones.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
232 / SARA DICKEY
‘people who work in offices don’t require cell phones’. Despite this attempt at saving face, there was some embarrassment all around.
Later in the conversation, when I asked them what kinds of goods and
resources (vacati) people typically acquire as they move from poverty to
relative comfort and in what order, they began with the basics of shelter
and minimal household appliances such as a radio or television or blender.
Then these three young adults—all familiar in some way with poverty—
moved to the next levels of acquisition:
Murugan: Before buying a house itself, the last important vacati would
be a fridge.
Anjali: And after that, things for showing off (ātampara jāmān).
People won’t use those things, they’ll just buy them and keep them at
home or carry them around. Like a cell phone—it’s for showing off.
{Laughs}
Sara: A cell phone is just a show, for some people?
Anjali: Yes, it’s just a show. They won’t use a telephone, they’ll just
keep one for others to see.
Sundaram then echoed Murugan’s earlier statement by saying, ‘People
who work in offices don’t need them’. Given the status enhancement that cell phones provide, I began to understand further why Sundaram and
Anjali had rationalised not having a cell phone.
The striking symbolic value of the mobile phone was evoked even
more strongly by people who are positioned higher in the middle class.
Renganathan, a Chettiar advertising company manager in his mid-­50s, talked in 2005 about why he needed a cell phone:
Because I’m in marketing, I need a mobile phone. I may receive calls
at any time. But frankly, owning a mobile has become a fashion, a
status symbol. Like a car—if you are rich, you have a car. If you are
middle class, you have a two-wheeler. And you also have a mobile
phone, whether you have any reason to get calls or not. You need a
certain brand, a colour monitor, all that. It means you are modern, and
then people will respect you. Only if you have these things, you are
recognised. You exist, for them. Otherwise you are not recognised,
you don’t exist.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 233
Renganathan’s experience condenses Murugan’s and Anjali’s observations about cell phone functions into a unified critique. Making an even more sardonic point, Sekaran, a 40 year old linguistics professor who is
Pallar, said in 2009 that to lack up-to-date goods such as expensive cell
phones means that ‘you don’t get people’s attention, you don’t get their
respect, and then you are just like a small insect crawling around’. Both
of these men see themselves as upper-middle class. For them, to lack
consumer goods means to be unrecognised and invisible—even less than
human—while to display them is to make a claim to a social presence
and to matter in the social body.
This equation between consumption and existence was brought out in
another way during my conversation with a group of post-baccalaureate
students who were working towards a credential in medical transcription.
In 1999, as outsourcing was just beginning to appear in Madurai, these
students hoped that this new occupation would provide a more substantial
income than their parents had as shop owners, farmers and civil servants.
When I asked why they wanted a job in transcription, two of them answered
half-­jokingly, ‘To eat’. Rajendran, a Nādār man in his 20s, elaborated on this. He said that if you lack the income to buy the consumer goods
required for being seen as middle class, and
if you (still) want to be in the middle class, you don’t eat. Really, you can’t stay in that status. You’ll have to change, you won’t be able to
buy things, you will feel very bad (manacu kastamā irukkum, your
mind will suffer). ‘But look, they don’t have money, the children are
starving’, that’s what people will think.
Like all the other speakers quoted in this article, he evoked witnesses to
their imagined desperation as they cling to their hold on a place in the
middle class.
Rajendran and his classmates argued that they cannot ‘survive’ in the middle class without an occupation like medical transcription. Rajendran’s poignant association of starvation with the lack of middle-class capital
was hyperbole, but it was telling. He and the others suggested that if they
cannot buy what they need to maintain their standing, they will be written
off as if they are poor and pitiable. They imply that in their social world,
those who cannot acquire and maintain the visible signs that legitimate
middle-­class standing will become as socially invisible, insignificant and Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
234 / SARA DICKEY
despised as the poor—which is precisely the way that poor respondents
described themselves.
All these accounts produce a portrait of people self-consciously
consuming in ways that they hope will produce recognition of them not
simply as proper social beings, but more fundamentally, as beings who
are fully human. If you do not consume in proper ways, you are not seen,
perceived, or known (avan.kalukku en.kalai teriyātu glosses in English
simultaneously as ‘they do not see us’, ‘we are not visible to them/perceived, by them’, ‘they do not know us’). People ignore you because you
are beneath them (tālvu, a term that refers both to physical height and
social treatment), suggesting again that you are not within their field of vision. They dismiss you (ikallcci kutuppān.ka) because you do not count
as worthy of recognition. You are less than human. If, however, your
inadequate consumption abilities are noticed, you are pitied (pāvam), a
desperate, immoral, despicable condition. Recognisability requires both basic economic and cultural capital, in order to be decent and neat; and
more finely graded forms of capital are required to substantiate oneself further. If you perform class properly, you will be recognised by a relevant
audience and you will be extended mariyātai, a term that means distinction and respect but also, just as significantly, denotes inclusion within a reference group (Mines 2005: 92). Being positively apprehended creates
dignity, self-worth and belonging.
VI
Further apprehensions
One of the anxieties of middle-class life is, of course, the scrutiny that
provides the necessary field for visibility. Behaviours are watched closely, judged in particular for signs of moderation or excess. Middle-class people
often speak of themselves in Goffmanesque terms, as acting on a stage
surrounded by a critical audience (Dickey 2012; Goffman 1959). As a
recently married Brahman factory clerk put it in 2001, ‘In the middle,
there are all these expectations to show that you belong where you are,
and it is very hard to be able to afford to do everything right’. Another
clerk, a middle-­aged Thevar man who works in a university office, also said that ‘middle people’ must do everything right: they cannot drink in
public, they must wear clean clothing and they must marry within their
caste, because otherwise ‘everyone will talk about them’.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 235
Another anxiety linked to the idea of visibility is the fear of attracting the
attention of others in ways that will draw kan tirusti , a force usually translated somewhat misleadingly as the ‘evil eye’. As Melanie Dean discusses in
this issue, observers who focus on, admire, compliment or desire something
that is attractive or appealing can draw misfortune to the bearer or owner of
the good or quality, or to the object itself. It is important to be recognised and
included, rather than being invisible on the social landscape, but standing
out—performing too well—can cause harm. Kan tirusti is usually a threat
when a person stands out in some way. Anjali, for example, once broke her
wrist after being knocked down in the street by a bicycle, just days before
opening her own business after years of working towards achieving it, and
she knew that this was because her neighbours were envious. Of course,
even simply managing to appear decent, the minimal criterion for recognition as middle class, can elevate a person above others.21
Moreover, what is proper consumption for one middle-class person may
be thought improper for another. Age and gender commonly determine appropriate consumption within or across caste, religion and class groupings.
Lower-middle- and middle-class young men, for example, demonstrate
‘style’ with branded clothing that, in its mild transgressiveness, marks them
as liminally located between children and adults, and on the margin of
‘society’ (Nakassis, this issue). For adults, gendered differences can appear
in, for instance, norms of technology use. Darshini, a Nādār woman in her 40s who teaches in a high school and runs a tutoring business, pointed out
in 2004 that she was criticised for carrying a cell phone. She said,
A man can have it, but a woman? She has to keep it inside her purse.
One (autorickshaw) driver asked me, ‘Why do you want to keep it in
your hand? Why can’t you keep it in your bag?’ I said, ‘Why can’t
I have it in my hand?’ and finally he kept quiet. My sister’s husband challenges me also. They think it is something like women’s equality.
They don’t want women to speak anything in the public, other than
with their relatives or their husband.
In this socially conservative city, the same consumer good that produces
status and belonging for men can lead to charges of immoral behaviour for
21
See Dean (2011) for examples among lower- and lower-middle-class residents of
Madurai.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
236 / SARA DICKEY
women.22 When I recounted this story to Anjali, she rationalised women’s
pattern of carrying phones in concealed places, by saying it was just a
matter of women not having shirt pockets, so they put their phones in their
handbags instead.23 Then she added that women are criticised for using
cell phones because unlike men, who ‘will attend to their calls and finish their business quickly and switch them off, ladies will keep talking for a
long time, and disturb the people around them’. Unrestrained, unmonitored communication for women is, at the least, a social nuisance, and
possibly a social danger. Doron (2012) describes a similar understanding
in Varanasi, where mobile phones symbolise social networks outside the
control of patriarchal authority. Restricting women’s access to mobile phones is used there to ‘reinforce and reconstitute gender ideology’ within
the marital household.24 Here, concerns for decency overlap with concerns
to display fetishised consumer goods, as women’s improper use of
cell phones is characterised as indecent. Such examples indicate a
gendered dimension to visibility, just as there are age, caste and religious
dimensions, among others.
Thus, the same markers that can give one the edge in performing to a
group can attract attention or envy and draw kan tirusti or verbal criticism, and the markers that are successful for one person may draw censure for
another. It is a difficult balance. But what kind of balance? I would not argue that there is a single register or spectrum of visibility, in which an
individual strives to be sufficiently but not excessively visible. Rather, people need to feel seen and recognised, to be accorded presence, in
order to feel dignity and self-worth (see also Mines 2005; Sayer 2005).
Simultaneously, many do not want to stand out dramatically—at least
not to particular audiences, at particular times. Only certain people, in
22
Cf. Donner et al., who note that for some conservative Bangalore housewives, ‘modesty
. . . meant not owning a mobile phone’ (2008: 332). The authors argue that ‘rejection of
mobile ownership reflects the traditional gender directive for modest women to stay close to the home’ (ibid.: 333).
23
Melanie Dean (personal communication) has noted that the tailoring of men’s clothes
supports other display as well, such as the stylish pens tucked into shirt pockets along with
cell phones. On the other hand, she points out, fashions have developed to enable the (visible)
concealment of women’s portable consumer goods, such as discreet mobile phone bags to
accompany matching silk saris.
24
There are other gendered patterns linking cell phone use and concerns for decency.
One example is men’s use of cell phones to share pornography, which must not take place
in the presence of women and elders.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 237
certain circumstances, wish to draw attention to themselves in this way,
as Dean and Nakassis argue in this issue. To a great extent, the desire to
be seen is the desire to be recognised by a larger public, both known and
unknown. Here, it is worth remembering the generalised references to
‘people’ and ‘them’ that Sekaran and Renganathan make when referring to observers evaluating their consumption practices, and the non-­specific ‘they’, ‘you’ and ‘we’ invoked by Murugan and Anjali, all connoting a
rather diffuse social body (cf. Nakassis’s discussion in this issue of youth
apprehensions of ‘society’). On the other hand, the attempt to rise in
status by fashionably standing out may be a bid directed to a specific and known group of peers.
VII
Conclusions
I have examined two of the most consistent themes in Madurai residents’
discussions of middle-class membership: the critical importance of appearing decent in order to reach the lower threshold of the middle class,
and the crucial significance of consumer fashions—particularly the cell phone—to signal belonging and exclusion for people at all levels of the
middle class. Such observations, concerns and anxieties lie fully in the
realm of the mundane. The hopes for recognition and the acts of judgement seem so small that they are easy to dismiss. Yet, they make up a
good deal of the daily experience and impact of class for many people.
Economist Avner Offer recognises the fundamental nature of this desire
when he writes that ‘interaction is driven by the grant and pursuit of
regard’ (2006: 77), citing a passage from Adam Smith’s The Theory of
Moral Sentiments:
What are the advantages which we propose to gain by that great purpose
of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to
be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and
approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from
it. (Smith 1976 [1759], 1, ch. ii.1: 50, as cited in Offer 2006: 77)
‘To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy’
is precisely what Madurai residents try to attain from those around them.
To be seen is to count, to have substance, visibility and humanity; not to
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
238 / SARA DICKEY
be seen is to be low, empty or void, invisible and non-human. In Madurai,
the proper use of consumer goods helps a person to become visible, but
material goods do not mean the same thing in everyone’s hands. Some
people are more fully able to use these objects than others. In particular,
gender and generation (like caste and religion) affect individuals’ potential
for deployment and sublation of styles and goods (see Vera-Sanso 2007).
There are also differences in individuals’ motivations for using consumer
goods as a strategy for gaining respect. Willingness to take part in conspicuous consumption varies by caste, and the display or use of certain
material goods may be deemed more or less appropriate for people of
particular castes (see Dickey 2012). Caste can also shape the importance
of visible consumption more fundamentally. In more anonymous urban
settings, lower-­caste people with vacati may find it more pressing than higher castes to gain recognition through the material signs of class, which
are oftentimes less essentialised than caste attributes.25
In doing this research, I have frequently been drawn to what I observed
as a drive to be treated with dignity. The question I asked of Murugan, Anjali
and Sundaram—‘Why shouldn’t people know you are suffering?’—was
intentionally naïve but sincerely curious. Independent of the experience of
material comfort or deprivation, one of the most immediate daily concerns
for many people is how they will be treated by the others they encounter.
Will they belong? Will they be seen as someone who counts, someone
worthy of recognition, someone who has done and will do what it takes to
be a full social being? The desires revealed in the many answers to my often
unspoken question substantiate Michael Jackson’s assertion that regardless
of the circumstances of daily life, it is the ‘experience of being in control’
that matters more consciously than objectively being in control of wealth,
power, or ‘the fate of one’s fellow human beings’ (1998: 22). Jackson calls
dignity a gloss for the ‘existential imperative’ (ibid.: 206–07), the ‘truth . . .
that people need to have some say in the world into which they are thrown,
that they must in some measure choose their own lives and feel that they
have a right to be here’ (ibid.: 195). Anton Blok puts this in the negative:
people, he writes, ‘require some measure of recognition and repute, lest
they die a social death’ (2001: 9). That social death is the invisibility that
25
But see Frøystad, who argues that class judgements in Kanpur are highly informed by
unarticulated assumptions about the correlation of caste and class, and that ‘the distinction
between markers based on economic means and genetic heritage was not as clear-cut as it
may seem’ (2006: 170).
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
On gaining recognition as middle class in Madurai / 239
denies dignity. Dignity, as I have argued, is an aspect of social relations
rarely discussed in studies of class, but the value of dignity frequently
underlies the discussion of consumption in everyday life.
Gaining a modicum of dignity also entangles people within the very
hierarchical system whose effects they are trying to mitigate. This is
not simply because performing according to the rules of the game can
reproduce the hegemony of class, but more precisely because it sets the
performers up to be evaluated by—and to evaluate—others through the
diffuse social gaze. Dignity of this type is not an egalitarian ‘human
dignity’, but a dignity dependent on the respectful gaze and address of
judgemental others. In seeing and in presenting themselves in ways that
invite being seen, these residents produce themselves as both subject and
object in a field of power relations (Foucault 1978, 1980). Those quoted in this article, all of whom strive to be recognised regardless of how
‘high’ they are in the class system, act as subjects when they themselves
identify those by whom they want to be granted respect. They thereby
continuously re-position themselves as objects of others’ gaze and judgement. On the other hand, aware that they are offering themselves up to
scrutiny, this behaviour is also a means of ‘managing the gaze’ (Staples
2003: 301). But there is a mutuality to this vision (in some ways akin to
darsan): it is reciprocated. Such an exchange not only exercises power but also indicates belonging.26
The compelling need to claim dignity and a place in the social body,
which in these accounts appear to be highly dependent on the regard of others, is what most consciously motivates the care with which people acquire
material goods and the knowledge of their proper use. At the same time,
these actions tie people to nodes of power in a capitalist system marked
by highly diffuse modes of control. The imprecise but all-encompassing
sense of a disciplining audience is reflected in Madurai residents’ non-­
specific use of pronouns when they describe who observes and who is observed. The self-conscious critique of the performance of class, in which
26
I am conscious of the visual metaphors in this paragraph and elsewhere in this article
that link sight with knowledge (‘in the eyes of’, ‘viewed as’, ‘seen as’). Alan Dundes has
highlighted the ‘primacy of vision in American culture’ (1972: 8), arguing that English gives
preeminence to vision over other senses as a metaphor for knowing and understanding. In
some ways, this connection also appears in the Tamil verb teri, to be known/be visible. On
the other hand, ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’ have different significance in Tamil society, as with the mutuality of darsan.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 217–243
240 / SARA DICKEY
participants are at once actor and audience, object and subject, suggests
a level of awareness of the engagement in a play of power. At the same
time, the apparently contradictory drive for dignity, which is dependent
on this very interaction played out in this way, remains key to the wellbeing of many people.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Susan Bell, Melanie Dean, Diane Mines, Constantine Nakassis and Llerena
Searle for helpful discussions of ideas and literature as I formulated the arguments in this
article. Ritty Lukose also provided a productive critique of key points in her comments on the 2009 American Anthropological Association panel for which this article was originally
written. Funding for the research was provided by the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies and Bowdoin College.
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